


Attending 'Hamlet' at the Old Vic

by Crowgirl, elizajane



Series: What Happened After (Two Men Walked Into a Bar) [3]
Category: Downton Abbey, Foyle's War
Genre: Comment Fic, Crack, Crossover, Crossovers & Fandom Fusions, I Don't Even Know (Continued), M/M, More Gratuitous Torchwood/Doctor Who Cameos Because We Can
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-04
Updated: 2016-06-04
Packaged: 2018-07-12 07:21:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,327
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7091353
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Crowgirl/pseuds/Crowgirl, https://archiveofourown.org/users/elizajane/pseuds/elizajane
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An evening at the theatre.</p><p>A.K.A. act three of our self-indulgent comment fic.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Attending 'Hamlet' at the Old Vic

A tall woman with a thick head of long curly hair shows them to their seats in the theatre, handing each of them a program with a smile as they step past her to sit down. 'Enjoy yourselves, gentlemen,' she says as she turns to leave and Myerson tries to convince himself there hadn't been a knowing tilt to her lips. Of course there hadn't -- the idea is ridiculous; those instincts of his, never allowed to dull and so useful in his work, are running out of hand over a few glasses of wine and a good crepe.

Grantham settles in comfortably. 'Have you seen any of these players before?'

Myerson glances at the program as he tries to ease the bottom buttons of his waistcoat without Grantham noticing. 'Er -- Bloom, I think. Can't remember what in.'

'Ah, yes -- she's excellent. Quite the presence on the stage.' Grantham slips the program into an inside pocket of his coat and shifts as if the seat is uncomfortable. Alec leans sideways to give him room -- and realises that Grantham, without apparently any sense of self-consciousness, is doing what he had just tried to pretend he wasn't. Once again, Robert catches him looking and gives him the kind of grin schoolboys share over a successful paper airplane.

'Far too old now to pretend I'm comfortable for the sake of keeping the line of a suit.' He unbuttons the waistcoat to the top and lets the fronts fall apart. 'Ah -- much better.' He resettles his jacket and adds, 'And Mother isn't here to scold me for being too informal.'

Alec glances around, surreptitiously, as if one of the ushers will rap their knuckles for improper behavior. Really, he thought himself years beyond this sort of jumpy nervousness -- the sort he remembers so keenly from his early days at Christ Church, when all the other young men seemed to be communicating effortlessly in a secret code of manners Alec himself struggled to interpret.

As the house lights dim, he finds himself distracted by the thought of Grantham beside him in mild déshabillé. As the murmur of the audience settles into quiet and the curtain rises on Act I, Scene I -- _'Who's there?' 'Nay, answer me: stand, and unfold yourself.'_ \-- Alec's fingers twitch against his own partially-unbuttoned waistcoat.

He's distracted by the play of Grantham's fingers over his own mother-of-pearl buttons, the flick of thumb and forefinger, the parting of the cloth, the soft curve of Grantham's chest and belly beneath starched cotton. Before he can stop himself, he's imagining what it would be like to reach out and pick up where Grantham's left off.

_'Long live the king!'_

_'Bernardo?'_

_'He.'_

_'You come most carefully upon your hour.'_

_''Tis now struck twelve; get thee to bed, Francisco.'_

_'For this relief much thanks: 'tis bitter cold, and I am sick at heart.'_

He really should be paying attention to the play. He's aware of how he wishes to impress Grantham, now, and it's been years since he has thought about Hamlet. He's read the play, of course, in school but -- he wants Grantham to find him cultured. Doesn't want Grantham to think he's spent the last fifteen years married to his job, working seventy hours a week for Queen and country ... even if that's exactly was he has been doing.

He pulls in a breath and lets it out again, soundlessly, closes his eyes and tries to listen to the players before him without the distraction of Grantham's silhouette teasing at the corner of his eye.

When the lights flash up briefly at the end of the second act, Myerson stares at the curtain for a minute and then shakes his head. 'What a bloody voice.'

'Marvellous, isn't it.' Grantham leans forward in his seat, stretching his shoulders. Alec fixes his eyes on the curtain firmly. 'I'd read about him of course but--'

'Not quite the same.' Alec watches other theatre-goers make their way up the aisle. 'Do you smoke?' He makes a gesture. 'I don't but--'

Grantham waves a hand. 'Not any more. I did, for years, but my wife complained so that I gave it up.'

Myerson nods, pulling his program out from under his arm and pretending to study it. Wife, wife, of course, the man has a wife--

'I suppose I could take it up again now, though,' Grantham says thoughtfully.

'Wife lost her sense of smell?'

'Gained a young Welshman.'

'Oh!' The exclamation escapes him before he can thinks and he looks over at Grantham immediately. His secretary hadn’t managed to dig up that little family secret. Robert smiles and shrugs.

'He was invalided home just before the end of the war -- one of the last patients in Downton's wards. I thought he seemed to be taking rather a long time to improve, but I'd no idea he wasn't going to leave.'

'It -- doesn't bother you?' Alec can feel his eyebrows climbing towards his hairline. Being ... open-minded about a daughter who no longer lives in your home, and a mother thirty years your senior, is one thing --

Robert looks thoughtfully at the stage curtain for a minute, his fingers drumming on the arm of his chair. Then he shifts forward, turning to face Alec, his arm on the back of the temporarily empty seat in front of him. 'It did.'

Alec stares at him and tries to think past the rush of blood in his ears. Grantham waits, watching him, and, after a minute, Myerson is able to clear his throat and ask, 'It doesn't now?'

He gets a tiny tilt of a smile for that -- more than he deserves, he thinks, for being unpardonably slow to catch on to his own thoughts -- and Grantham shrugs. 'It's left me feeling rather … independent.'

The house lights flicker before Alec can formulate a response, and the intermission-murmur of the audience dies back down to near-silence. A few stragglers, who had stepped outside for a smoke or the powder room, return hurriedly to their seats as the ushers close the doors in preparation for Act III.

The house lights sink back into darkness and Claudius, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern enter stage right, the king leading and already talking, the two courtiers following at a respectful distance.

Alec isn't paying attention to the stage, however, as he replays the intermission conversation over in his head. He looks down at his programme as if to check the scene notes, though the light is too dim for him to extract any meaning from the smudge of text -- damn astigmatism. He hadn't brought his reading glasses as he felt they aged his face. They reminded Alec of his grandfather and he didn't want to acknowledge that he was as old now as his grandfather had been in childhood memory.

He fidgets with the open page of his program, creasing the cheap paper against his own thigh with a thumbnail and then unfolding it again, feeling the fragile fiber of the paper begin to tear.

The man in the seat in front of him had gone out at intermission for a smoke and Alec can smell the scent of a rather expensive cigarette clinging to the man's jacket. He'd given up smoking toward the end of the war, hasn't often missed it in the years since, but suddenly craves the distraction -- something to do with his hands and his mouth that is not what he currently wishes to do with his mouth and his hands.

It's all rather embarrassing. He feels himself colour even in the dark from the shame of desire -- the flicker of hope that Grantham is actually offering what Alec's traitorous mind would like very much for him to be offering.

He's folding and unfolding the corner of his program for the third time when he feels the warm weight of Grantham's hand on his wrist.

He stills. 'Sorry,' he mutters, reflexively, under his breath, assuming the movement is distracting Grantham's enjoyment of the production -- their purpose in being here, after all. Why can’t he concentrate? He’s never had this much trouble ignoring himself before.

There's a soft _shuft_ of cloth as Grantham leans into Alec's side, a creak of the arm rest as his weight shifts.

'I find,' Grantham murmurs against Alec's ear -- his thumb brushing rather distractingly against the surprisingly-sensitive skin on inside of Alec's wrist -- 'that if you pay attention to the delivery rather than the words themselves, the tone in which the actors deliver the lines, their body language, let the words themselves wash over you -- I find it is often possible to follow the action of the play even if the words themselves are so much poetic nonsense.'

Alec draws a careful breath, waiting for the stab of disappointment that will come when Grantham's hand withdraws.

Except he doesn't pull back.

'As they say,' Grantham continues -- his voice a study in bland observation, though his thumb continues brushing light, warm circles against the underside of Alec's wrist, 'Actions speak louder than words.'

Alec closes his hand into a fist and then releases it again, feeling the bones of his wrist shift under Grantham’s almost non-existent touch.

Then he takes a carefully steadying breath and twists his forearm so that his palm turns upward and Grantham's hand slides into his.

He fancies he can hear the smile in Grantham's next breath as the man turns back to watch the scene unfolding onstage, leaving his hand gently clasped in Alec's lap.

By the time the interval before the fifth act comes, it almost feels natural to have the weight of Robert's hand in his -- and quite disappointing when he gently pulls it away just before the lights dim up. Alec joins in the applause almost mechanically, his throat dry and his hand tingling.

'I -- think I'll step out for a drink,' he says, stepping into the aisle as soon as opportunity offers itself.

'Certainly.' Robert smiles at him. 'I hope you have sharp elbows.'

'Sharp enough.' Alec smiles back, fighting against the cold, slightly sick feeling of anxiety in his stomach and turns away.

It takes less elbowing, more judicious weight-throwing to get into the bar, and Myerson uses his bulk ruthlessly until he wins himself a slot at the corner of the bar and a double whiskey.

The young woman -- not as young as he had first thought, notes the continual observer in him, cataloging the wrinkles around her eyes and at the corners of her lips -- who serves him is the same who showed them their seats and she smiles at him. 'Enjoying the play?'

'Yes. Yes, it's -- very good.'

She takes his shilling, returns his change, and nods, turning away to the next customer.

Myerson cups his glass and lets himself be shuffled gently into the corner; he notices, almost absently, that the man who takes his place looks much the same as the tall American who had been at the club the other night. Of course, the other man has every right to attend the theatre if he wishes; there's nothing particularly odd about that. He and the woman behind the bar seem to know each other -- perhaps if she works at the theatre, this is their equivalent of a night out. Nothing odd about any of it, really.

What's odd is that he just spent the last hour holding hands like a school girl in the back row of the cinema -- and this is the most amount of physical contact he's had with anyone in--

Doing the calculation is depressing, so he gives it over in favor of knocking back half his whiskey.

He's used to understanding the situation in any room he's in. Perhaps he isn't in charge of it, but he understands the ramifications of it, the relationships between the people in it, the possible ripple effects in the outside world. And now the world has narrowed to himself and Lord Grantham and he can still feel the warm, dry pressure of those fingers on the inside of his wrist. And he wants them back.

'Hell,' he mutters to himself, takes the rest of the whiskey at a swallow, and leaves the glass on the nearest table.

Grantham looks up as Alec sinks back into his seat. 'Bar any good?'

'Not bad.' Alec runs a hand over his forehead and casts around for some way to ask any of the dozens of questions he's thought of. There isn’t a way -- there simply isn’t any way for any of these questions to be broached and he suddenly finds himself wondering how the hell Foyle managed it. He's about to subside in despair when the house lights dim down, then brighten again, people begin to stream back to their seats, and Grantham says, almost conversationally, 'Speaking of drinks, I unearthed a rather fine bottle of Glenlivet in a friend's cellar the other day.'

'Yes?'

'Mm.' Grantham leans back in his chair. 'I claimed it in repayment of an old debt.'

'Ah.'

The lights dim down towards darkness and Alec feels Grantham lean over close to him again: 'So if you fancy a drink after this--' At the same time, Grantham's hand steals over his own and Alec feels his heartbeat settle back again.

He swallows once or twice and leans back towards Grantham, interlacing their fingers as he does. 'Are you under the impression you have to get me tipsy? Because I assure you, you don't.'

oOo

Robert says a silent prayer of thanks to whichever gods his mother and daughter pray to, because his gamble -- like theirs -- appears to be paying off.

The play is undeniably good -- excellent, even, possibly the best Hamlet he's seen since his university days. Possibly ever. He'll have to remember to watch this Burton fellow for future appearances. And the Ophelia -- she'll be Someone in a year or two. So he'd have been pleased by the evening's effort either way. If Myerson had ignored his flirtations (good God it's been decades since he's considered himself capable of playing the game -- he's rather surprised he hasn't lost his touch!), Robert would have considered it a few pounds and pence well spent on a meal. And he expects they would have settled into a sociable acquaintance.

Myerson's hand in his, however, indicates such a settling isn't in the cards. Robert feels the strength in Myerson's grip, a slightly damp palm indicating nerves or merely the stuffy atmosphere of the theatre. In an act of daring, Robert shifts toward Myerson again, as if to comment upon the performance in Myerson's ear, and uses the opportunity to bring the back of Myerson's hand -- dry and slightly papery, like Robert's own have become -- to his lips in a brushing kiss.

oOo

Alec feels as if a jolt of electricity has been abruptly transmitted through his chair. He jerks his hand free of Grantham's and drives both hands deep into his jacket pockets.

It's only when the stage starts to darken before his eyes that he realises he has actually stopped breathing and takes in a deep gasp of air.

oOo

Robert straightens, slowly, pulling himself back into his own seat so that no part of him -- even the cuff of his sleeve -- is touching Myerson and curses, inwardly, at the sudden retreat. The brandy and good company had gone to his head and he’d been too bold, too forward, too obvious.

To apologize now would be to acknowledge that something happened, something for which an apology might be warranted. So he holds his tongue and wonders if he's lost his chance at ... whatever had been on offer. _Damnable instincts._ He should know better than to trust them.

He rubs his palms down his trouser legs, absently, feeling the ghost of Myerson's touch. Given the rigid set of Myerson's shoulders in the corner of his eye, it's all too easy to wonder if he’s imagined the ... flirtation, that's what it had been; that's what he would have understood it to be if Myerson were a lady companion. Is it really so ... different with a man? He's always wondered (while trying not to wonder). He had thought, for a brief moment this evening, that perhaps it wasn't. But now he can feel the doubts creeping in.

oOo

Alec fixes his gaze on a spot at the front of the stage, ignoring the run and rush of dialogue, and gritting his teeth so hard he can feel the pressure of a bad filling in one molar.

How could Grantham be such a _fool_ \-- how could _he_ allow something like this to _happen_ \-- Sir Alec Myerson has worked _too hard_ for _too long_ \-- The sharp ring of a bell interrupts his thoughts; he blinks at the stage and can make nothing of it. There are colors and shapes and voices -- one voice speaking in Latin which he translates automatically and doesn’t mean much of anything to him until he realises what he's hearing is part of a shortened service for the dead, talking about life cut short, hope ended.

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Grantham sitting straight as a soldier, as if he'd been called to attention, his hands carefully clasped in his lap, his eyes fixed on the stage.

The silence between them, which had been companionable for most of the evening, settles around them like a pall. It remains even as the play ends and the audience around them erupts into applause. Robert claps automatically, and feels Myerson next to him do the same, both of them rising to their feet as those around them give Burton a standing ovation.

When the curtain finally drops and the house lights rise all the way, the audience as a body begins to gather their belongings and shuffle out in orderly queues down the aisles.

Myerson, being closest to the aisle, rises first and gestures. 'Shall we?'

oOo

'Lead the way,' Robert says, wishing Myerson's tone betrayed anything at all about what the man was thinking. The set of his shoulders had eased slightly, but still lacked the ease of earlier. Before Robert's stupid _stupid_ miscalculation. The theatre suddenly feels overcrowded and unbearably warm. Robert can feel himself sweating under his collar and at the backs of his knees, which always happens when he's nervous. _Blast._

'About that drink,' he begins, low in Myerson's ear as they step out onto the street and the necessity of hailing a cab looms.

Myerson gives him a look that's almost pained. Then sighs and passes a hand across his forehead. He glances down the street, where the theatre-goers are thinning out as they catch cabs, are picked up by drivers, descend into the underground.

‘Walk with me,’ Myerson says.

‘There's -- really no need,' Robert says, knowing he sounds stiff and awkward and unable to do a damned thing about it. He feels stiff and awkward and _old_ in a way he hasn't in a long time -- not since mother had announced her intention of going to Egypt. And it's all his own fault -- he can't blame Myerson for being cautious! If nothing else, the man is practically _paid_ to be cautious! He probably has the penalties for -- for what Robert had been incautiously trying to suggest they could engage in memorized, could recite them chapter and bloody verse.

'Isn't there.' Myerson's response is dry but not flat; Robert's feeling too flat himself to take full account of it but he almost sounds amused. 'I know you promised Glenlivet but, honestly, this evening has been about as much fine living as my liver can take at one time--'

'Yes, well, then, thank you very much for the--'

Alec sighs and rubs a hand over his forehead again, pushing his hat back slightly. 'Bloody hell, man, we can hardly have this conversation standing in the street, can we?' He touches Robert's upper arm, urging him down the pavement towards the brightly lit intersection at the next corner. 'So -- walk with me.'


End file.
